mass-specific engulfment capacity

Skull and buccal cavity allometry increase mass-specific engulfment capacity in fin whales

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ETA: Yoinked from the same blog, beautiful time-lapse video of starfish and ribbon worms eating a seal carcass. Warning, it has gross bits, esp. a couple of minutes in where the worms, uh, you know, do what worms do before they play pinochle on a guy.

Monster worm and sea star frenzy

Deep under the Antarctic ice, a rare, colourful burst of starfish and 3m-long monster worms has been filmed by a BBC camera crew.

Filmed in time-lapse, the extraordinary swarm of deep-sea [well-lit? -eub] creatures gathers to feed in a frenzy on the body of a seal, which had sunk to the ocean floor.

today: baaaby migraine, oxalis tubers, ice-filtering fish spleens

(1) While I was cutting open an Abutilon megapotamicum flower for breakfast, I couldn't see it well -- the light seemed bad, somehow. No, I had a little central scotoma, I found. I took two cups of coffee and two ibuprofen -- when I set one pill down and looked an inch to its right, it disappeared. The scotoma enlarged and crawled leftwards as a band, same way as the one migraine I had many years ago. Some headache, photosensitivity, so I holed up in a dark room, but really not much of a migraine at all. I give thanks for that.

(2) The stems got frozen and split, so I dug up the big pot of Oxalis tuberosa, oca. A good double handful of tubers from that plant. Raw, they're crunchy, a little starchy, and some nice flavor, with only mild oxalic acid tang except near the stem end.

(3) From a photo gallery of diving under Antarctic sea ice, some almost-frozen fish: "These fish actually have ice present on their external tissues (integument, gills, and intestinal tract) while their internal tissues (except the spleen) are ice-free. The presence of ice in the spleen suggests that the spleen removes ice crystals from the fishes' circulation."

ETA "This giant arborescent agglutinated foraminiferan Notodendrodes antarctikos stands up to 3.8 centimeters high -- remarkably large for a unicellular organism."